Cellular communication systems based on Cognitive Radio and Software Defined Radio paradigms are typically exploiting a standard wireless radio infrastructure as well as the presence of a Cognitive Pilot Channel (CPC) which may be sent on a specific reserved channel.
In this scenario, the Cognitive Pilot Channel (as it is under discussion within the ETSI RRS (European Telecommunications Standards Institute Reconfigurable Radio Systems) standardization group, for example), is broadcasting context information on a dedicated physical channel that helps the various user devices to know which communication standards are available (without requiring the handsets to scan for all possibilities). Typically, the user will be informed about the presence of cellular mobile radio communication systems (also referred to as Cellular Wide Area radio communication systems), metropolitan area mobile radio communication systems (also referred to as Metropolitan Area System radio communication systems) and/or short range mobile radio communication systems (also referred to as Short Range radio communication systems) and based on the context, the user device (assumed to be an SDR (Software Defined Radio) device that is reconfigurable) may choose a reconfiguration of its device.
A second type of a Cognitive Pilot Channel is the so-called Virtual Cognitive Pilot Channel (V-CPC). The V-CPC is transmitted to users via deployed Access Technologies, such as Cellular Wide Area, Metropolitan Area and/or Short Range mobile radio communication systems. In the V-CPC, no additional infrastructure needs to be deployed—however, UEs (User Equipments) need to have a first communication connection running before they can access the context information contained in the V-CPC.
Conventionally, an SDR handset device contains a reconfigurable SDR core (typically, a multitude of SIMD (Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data) processor cores assisted by accelerators, such as Maximum-Likelihood decoders, filters, etc.). In some conventional implementations, a reconfigurable transceiver is present.
In such an architecture, a handset device is usually not exploiting a (potentially available) Cognitive Pilot Channel. Rather, a handset device usually scans all available frequency bands and checks for the presence of all possible system configurations. In a standard scenario it is assumed that frequency allocations for the various radio communication systems are fixed. Still, the scanning of all possibilities typically takes a considerable amount of time and consumes large amounts of battery power.
In the future, it is expected that frequency allocations are no longer fixed for distinct radio communication systems and the number of possibilities to be considered during the scanning processing increases considerably, since the number of degrees of freedom rises. In such a context, the scanning of all possible permutations is becoming quasi impossible.